‘Pursue what makes for peace’

LOUISVILLE — For the Rev. Dr. Angela Johnson, there came a moment when enough was enough.

As the pastor of Grace Hope Presbyterian Church in Smoketown — a historically African American neighborhood in Louisville — Johnson said that while “the whole issue of violence in the community has always been important” to her, it was more than important.

It was personal.

Johnson can still remember a time when as many as four people in the congregation were affected by gun violence over the course of just one week.

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Her search for any small yet tangible act of resistance that the 42-member congregation — which averages 17 in worship — could muster led her to connect with Guns to Gardens Louisville.

“It was such a natural fit for who Grace Hope is,” she said of the interfaith group, which is part of a national Guns to Gardens movement.

The nonprofit — which offers gun safe-surrender opportunities in more than a dozen states — has drawn volunteers from Presbyterian, Baptist, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Episcopal and Methodist churches; a Unitarian Universalist congregation; and two synagogues. The group had its genesis some five years ago in a youth/adult Sunday school class at Crescent Hill Presbyterian Church.

Ruling Elder Eva Stimson, who currently serves both on Crescent Hill’s session and the Guns to Gardens Louisville board, has been a supporter from the beginning. Like many congregations that participate in the Peace & Global Witness Offering, Crescent Hill is committed to the work of peacemaking at all levels of church and society.

The annual Offering, which is highlighted during the Season of Peace, Sept. 7–Oct. 5, is traditionally received on World Communion Sunday, which falls this year on Oct. 5. Peace & Global Witness is unique in that half of the Offering is directed to efforts at the national church level for peacemaking and global witness work around the world, while 25% is retained by congregations for local peace and reconciliation work, and 25% goes to presbyteries for similar ministries on the regional level.

“Because the church has long seen gun violence as antithetical to its vision of God’s peaceable kingdom, for many decades the church has worked to curb the scourge of gun violence,” said Dr. Andrew J. Peterson, associate for Peacemaking for the Office of Public Witness in the Interim Unified Agency of the PC(USA).

On Nov. 10, 2024, Grace Hope did its part by hosting its first safe-surrender opportunity, at which the team of volunteers received 14 guns plus assorted other weapons such as knives, brass knuckles and slingshots.

One by one, they took turns chopping up the weapons to be turned into garden tools, art and jewelry later by a local blacksmith, evoking Isaiah 2:4 as the faithful “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

For Stimson, gun violence resonated with her most powerfully following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.

“Why do we need all these guns?” she wondered after yet another tragic school shooting. “I knew this was an issue that we, as Christians, needed to get involved in.”

Peterson said that the OPW is vigorously working on expanding the church’s gun violence witness.

“We’ve just launched a new partnership with Be SMART, an organization that has lent us their excellent resources on secure gun storage, an essential way of keeping kids safe from improperly stored firearms,” he said. “We have liturgical resources in development, and we continue to support a variety of congregation- and presbytery-level gun prevention events through the PC(USA)’s Decade to End Gun Violence grant programs.”

And Stimson is equally dedicated to supporting peacemaking at the national, presbytery and congregational levels through the Peace & Global Witness Offering.

“Because Crescent Hill usually has at least one ‘Minute for Mission’ leading up to the Offering, we’ve talked about Guns to Gardens as part of that,” she said. “And since we used our portion of the Offering this past year for our church’s own grassroots initiative, that’s how we promoted it to our congregation. Here’s a group that got started right here! If you give, part of your money will go to support our mission to ‘pursue what makes for peace.’”

Delivering help and hope in a backpack

Handwritten on bright orange construction paper, the first grader’s simple message was surrounded by smiling stick figures, hearts and flowers.

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“I am thankful for my food,” she wrote to the friends she has never met at Chester Presbyterian Church in Virginia.

For the past 12 years, the suburban Richmond congregation in the Presbytery of the James has partnered with Marguerite Christian Elementary School in Chesterfield County to provide backpacks of food for children — like the budding artist from Miss Nyquist’s first grade class — to take home over the weekend.

“Even though you wouldn’t think there’s poverty here because we’re pretty middle class, you’ll find a lot of low-income residents,” said Jane Ward, who joined the congregation in 1986 when their family moved to Chester. “And because many immigrants in our community make minimum wage working in restaurants or food service, their families need the backpacks of food to get them through the weekend.”

Ward, a retired high school marketing teacher who coordinates the congregation’s “Backpack Buddies” program, said that not only have times changed since she was teaching, the needs have also grown more critical.

“When the school asked us this year if we could increase the number of backpacks we provide, I knew we couldn’t manage it — thankfully, another church stepped up,” said Ward. “If it wasn’t for us, there would be some little kids hungry on the weekends. I wish I could feed them all.”

By confronting hopelessness through acts of compassion, the Chester Church’s “Backpack Buddies” program exemplifies the PC(USA)’s long-standing commitment to peacemaking.

“Feeding the hungry who are living in oppressive systems of poverty helps us to pursue what makes for peace,” said the Rev. Wilson Kennedy, the PC(USA)’s associate director for Special Offerings and Appeals.

Because Ward knows that poverty is one of the greatest threats to the healthy development of children, she and the church remain committed to “Backpack Buddies” despite the challenges. The congregation also provides a drive-through café that meets the needs of 90 to 105 residents weekly with a complete, hot meal on Thursdays.

“When children don’t eat, they can’t learn,” she said. “As long as we’re able to continue this program, we’re going to do it.”

Young advocate for women’s empowerment embraces her call as a ‘hope-bringer’

Standing strong with the great throng of advocates gathered for the world’s largest conference on women earlier this year, Adriana Soto Acevedo hungrily soaked up every experience.

“I was a sponge,” said the 25-year-old, who attended the 69th session of the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women at the U.N. headquarters in March. “I went there to absorb and learn.”

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Soto Acevedo, who attended CSW69 as a delegate affiliated with Iglesia Presbiteriana en Arecibo in Puerto Rico, the Presbytery of Philadelphia and Princeton Theological Seminary — where she will complete her Master of Divinity and Master of Arts in Christian Education and Formation degrees next year — said she was unprepared for how demanding the gathering would be.

“Whenever I think about ‘advocacy,’ I think of a person sitting or standing and talking about a topic like women’s rights,” she said. “But part of doing that work is informing yourself. I can’t just go out there and talk. I first need to have some informed space to learn about the problems that many women are facing all around the world.”

CSW69 — the U.N.’s largest annual gathering on gender equality and women’s empowerment — gave her just that opportunity.

Having already served the church extensively at the congregational, mid council and national levels — including as a deacon, a Young Adult Advisory Delegate, co-moderator of a Special Committee of the 225th General Assembly (2022) and a member of the Nominating Committee for the General Assembly — Soto Acevedo said she sees herself as a “hope-bringer.”

“Because peace is hard to grasp at the moment, I think that hope is more what we need, because hope is found in the relationships that we make with one another,” she said. “It’s more tangible for me. My goal is to connect with people and find the hope and the humanity in each person that I encounter.”

With a passion for community, social justice and theology, Soto Acevedo has already been able to tackle some of Puerto Rico’s social problems — such as colonialism, sexism, racism, homophobia, poverty and climate change — through both church and secular organizations.

Soto Acevedo is certain to change the world, although perhaps not right away.

“Now is my time to soak it all in,” she said. “To preach about CSW when I go back to Puerto Rico, and to meet with our presbytery’s Presbyterian Women, who partially funded my going.”

As did the Peace & Global Witness Offering.

“In this often-hopeless world,” she said, “our job is to crack little rays of hope by connecting with one another, by learning of the struggles we each go through, and by being there for each other.”